The Last Days of Dorothy Parker Read Online Free PDF

with her husband Sid were close friends. For Lilly, that was particularly reprehensible. Still bitter decades later, she told a friend, “I wish he were alive, I could kill him for that.” 34
    Other shortcomings of his were equally worthy of mayhem. Divorced from Arthur Kober, she was free to marry, even have children. Needless to say, this scenario was the furthest thing from Dash’s mind, and so a pregnancy in 1937 ended in abortion. For that matter, with their physical relationship pretty much over by 1935, the affair was running out of gas.
    While they continued to care for each other, it was a narrow definition of love that excluded marriage, family, passion, and fidelity. As always, he dictated the terms of their relationship. Refusing to put himself out on her account, he made no promises to stop drinking, divorce his wife, forgo prostitutes, or avoid gonorrhea. In self-defense, she had affairs with other men. Forced to let go, at least temporarily, she was adopting Dash’s cool hard-boiled style as she tried to remold herself into a she-Hammett, even if the original Hammett was not all that worthy of imitation.
    In the end, however, she would get the last laugh.

Chapter 4
NORMA PLACE
    (1951–1963)
    Lilly knew the subpoena was coming. When a man wearing a black preacher’s suit showed up at her house, he removed his hat before politely asking if she was Lillian Hellman. Then he handed over the envelope ordering her appearance before the committee investigating Communist influence in the motion picture industry. While he stood waiting, she read the subpoena, then slammed the door in his face.
    She did not think that she could feel so calm. Without telling anyone about the subpoena, she spent the next hour reading her mail and finally lay down for a nap. But she awoke drenched in sweat.
    In September 1951, a screenwriter named Martin Berkeley had told the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a member of the Communist Party for seven years, while working at MGM and Columbia. He testified under oath that scores of actors, directors, and fellow writers also belonged to the party and went on to identify, by name, 161 individuals. Among them were Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, and Alan Campbell. He placed the four of them, plus Donald Ogden Stewart, at his home on the day when, he said, the Hollywood section of the party was organized in June 1937. His place, he added, was chosen because he had a large living room and ample parking facilities. Nobody coughed up more names than Berkeley, who seems to have panicked and tossed in the names of innocent bystanders, like Alan, having no involvement with the party.
    As Lilly soon learned, all her alternatives were unpleasant. The Fifth Amendment gave her a constitutional right to refuse to answer questions on the grounds of self-incrimination, but she did not wish to claim the privilege, which she considered a sleazy circumvention famously favored by drug dealers and Mafioso. Knowing that she was in great trouble, she took the subpoena to a Washington attorney specializing in civil liberties and emphatically stated her own agenda. “I’m not going to jail,” she told Joseph Rauh. 60 Neither would she name names or take the Fifth. In fact, she would only answer questions about her own life. But, he warned, if she replied to questions about herself, she could be forced to talk about other people or face contempt charges. It was pointless to attempt horse-trading with the committee. Once again, she said that her main purpose was to avoid jail.
    Following Rauh’s instructions, she prepared an account of her political activities for the committee. Accordingly, she wrote about how she’d joined the party in 1938 without giving it much thought and remained a member until 1940. She would willingly tell the committee about her own activities but could not, in all good conscience, hurt innocent people to save